old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
I know Tumblr tends to be very US-centric, but there is something happening in my country that I absolutely have to share.
Soon, Brazil will host presidential elections. These are the first elections since the impeachment of our last president Dilma Rouseff.
The leading candidate is currently Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is a man who has made racist, sexist, and homophobic claims such as, “I would rather my son die in a car accident than be gay,” and, “my sons would not date black women as they were well educated.” He even said to a woman that she was, “so ugly” that she, “didn’t even deserve to get raped.”
A few decades ago, when Brazil was under a military dictatorship, the government tortured many people for speaking out against the regime. Bolsonaro has said that, “their only mistake was not killing those people.”
However, something incredible has been happening.
A movement called Mulheres Unidas Contra Bolsonaro (Women United Against Bolsonaro) has been surfacing. The hashtag #EleNão (#NotHim) has been getting popular and gaining international attention.
Yesterday, women all over Brazil (and the world!) protested against Bolsonaro.
Here are some pictures.
São Paulo, Brazil:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
Ilhéus, Brazil:
Cuiabá, Brazil:
Porto Alegre, Brazil:
Brazilians living abroad also joined the protests!
Zurich, Switzerland:
Madrid, Spain:
Melbourne, Australia:
New York City, US:
Protests occurred in over 62 cities around the world.
Even if you’re not Brazilian, please share this post! Show your support and raise awareness of the movement!
I went to this pole dancing class with my homegirl K the other day & we were in there with a bunch of housewives and their hubbys were watching and talking in the waiting room. We’re having fun laughing and what not learning how to swing around and pick ourselves up and hang upside down and what not. this one housewife (you know the ones that make snicker doodles for bake sale n shit) approached us and said “you two shouldn’t be here! Our husbands can see us right through that window and we don’t need you two coming in here and trying to wreck our marriages.” So at this point K and I are looking at each other like
And she’s clearly upset about it she’s redder than a habanero pepper at this point and she’s like do you have anything to say about yourselves? Are you happy that you can be the potential cause of several divorces? Blah blah blah. K and I are laughing hysterically at this point and I told her “maam, we aren’t here to ruin your marriage and if you think we are then you have problems in your marriage that are already present.” Before I can even turn around K bursts in with “plus your husband has had his eye on your friend with the Roshe Runs on anyways so looks like either A. He’s scheming on her or B. They’re already fucking and you didn’t even know it.
By this point the woman is just like
The woman breaks down crying and runs out the studio and the real drama unfolded right before our very eyes turns out her husband and her friend have been having an affair since 2007, her now ex bff’s husband is trying to fight the other dude saying “you’ve been fucking my wife?” Cops get called they’re trying to separate the two men who are now in a huge brawl. The other two cops (backup) are questioning everybody else and they can’t find Roshe Run girl because she disappeared in the midst of all the chaos.
Anyways long story short, the two men were arrested for disturbing the peace and I learned never to go to a pole dancing class in the Wonder Bread suburbs ever again.
if anyone would like to learn a couple tricks for carving pumpkins:
– dont cut out the top to scoop out the seeds, cut out the bottom instead. this way the pumpkin doesnt cave in on itself and lasts longer
– sprinkle some cinnamon inside at the top after carving. this way when you put the candle in it smells like pumpkin pie
this is the quality content I wanna see on my dash
– rub the i sides with lemon after you’re done scooping. This will also help preserve the pumpkin
It’s fucking June, at least wait until the fourth of July, you animal.
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of me disemboweling this pumpkin.
rip tumblr 